Ancient Hebrew Poetry

America’s Theologian-in-Chief: Obama’s Passover/Easter Message

    So long as Barack Obama is president, the United States will have a theologian-in-chief. At Oslo, Notre Dame, and Tuscon; at the national prayer breakfast in Washington, the president has shown that not only faith (fides quae, a relationship) but theology (fides qua, specific content) matters to him and informs his politics. Obama’s recent Passover/Easter message is in keeping with his choice to make the interrelationship of his faith and politics explicit.

A generation of locusts

    One of the nice things about blogging is that the genre allows one to write about anything and everything that seems important. Politics is important and, in the United States, we are in an election year. As usual, almost everything that is said for political consumption is either tasteless or tastes too good to be true. Speaking the truth is an ideal that almost no one adheres to. The lone partial exception is Ron Paul (by pointing this out, I am not thereby endorsing him). The best piece of political commentary I have read in the past year was penned by Nicola Rossi (b. 1951), one of the few Italian politicians worth hearing out. Every country, I would hope, has one or two politicians with a capacity for self-criticism, the rest being scoundrels, deludeds, or poppycocks.